Marcyliena Morgan is a Professor in the Department of African and African American Studies and Founding Director of the The Hiphop Archive and Research Institute (HARI) at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. She earned both her B.A. and her M.A. degrees at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She obtained an additional M.A. in linguistics at the University of Essex, England and her PhD through the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
Since 2002, when The Hiphop Archive and Research Institute’s was founded, students, faculty, artists, and other participants in Hiphop culture have been committed to supporting and establishing critical research and scholarship devoted to the knowledge, art, culture, materials, organizations, movements and institutions developed by those who support and follow Hiphop. In addition to her work on Hiphop culture, Professor Morgan has received research grants from the Ford Foundation and Centers for Disease Control. She has held tenured faculty positions in Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles and in Communications at Stanford University. Her research and teaching include African American and African Diasporan culture and language, hiphop, the ethnography of communications, identity in technology and media, gender and sexuality, education and language and race and class.
She is the author of many works that focus on youth, gender, racism, language, culture, identity, sociolinguistics, discourse and interaction, including the Daedulus (2011) publication “Hiphop and the Global Imprint of a Black Cultural Form” (with Dionne Bennett), Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and her book The Real Hiphop – Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the Underground (Duke University Press, 2008). Her most recent book publication is Speech Communities with Cambridge University Press (2014).